The Internet of Nuclear Things

[deanwebb]

http://www.un.org/apps/news/story.asp?NewsID=51018#.VW3vws9VhBf

I know it's not what John Chambers wants us to think about in his glorious "Internet of Everything!" vision, but this is the reality that we face. Even if we say that US, Russian, French, British, Israeli, and Chinese nuclear facilities and weapons are at the tip-top level of security with no worries possible or imaginable, could we really say the same things with the same level of confidence (and truth) for Indian, Pakistani, and North Korean facilities and weapons? And while they may have the best security in the nation, how well does that security stack up against what is needed to keep those things truly secure?

Then there is the matter of nuclear facilities in the rest of the world. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_by_country

Some nations that make me raise an eyebrow... Ukraine, Bulgaria, Armenia, Spain, Romania, Mexico, Argentina, Brazil, and Iran. These are places that are not famous for their attention to detail in matters of industrial safety. Without a dot every i and cross every t mentality, nuclear safety simply doesn't exist. Even normally fastidious Japan had massive errors in how it ran Fukushima, so who's to say that the famously easy-going Brazilians are doing the Japanese one better in this regard? 

[wintermute000]

this IoT thing has a lot of roadblocks in the path.

Even just simple things like patching/management is going to be an absolute nightmare. Its hard enough to coordinate patching and upgrades across corporate infrastructure, imagine having to goddamn patch every lightbulb or fridge, and/or the consequences if IoT stuff is just deployed and then never again updated/reconfigured.

Also, IPv6 needs to be in place, stat - or are we carrier grade NAT-ting from here to eternity? BUt when even thousand dollar Crisco routers still have various bugs with various features and/or varying host behaviour and even semi-critical functionality (like DNS via RA... who the eff left that out of the original design?) is only recently RFC ratified.... what hope do we have?


The average person has enough difficulty operating fruit products, how are they going to configure all this IoT stuff, or is it just going to work automagically since we've already cracked that barrier with every other consumer grade network connected gizmo... oh wait...

[deanwebb]

We keep postponing our IPv6 project... we're actually making better progress on reclaiming IPv4 address space than we are on converting to IPv6.